I’ve long wished for a camera I can carry with me for personal trips into the hills that is not as heavy as my Nikon professional DSLRs and lenses but still has great enough image quality so that, if I do capture something worthwhile, I can add the images to my stock image library and use them, at least, for editorial photography submissions.

I recently purchased a Sony RX100 V compact camera to trial on non-working days out in the mountains. My first outing with the Sony RX100 was in the West Highlands of Scotland on an ascent of Beinn Sgulaird (a Munro) and its neighbour, Creach Bheinn (a Corbett). I was joined by my friend David Hetherington, who I’ve enjoyed numerous trips with, and fellow adventure photographer Dan Bailey, who was visiting Scotland from Alaska with his wife on a 50th birthday present tour of the whisky distilleries of Islay.

The Sony RX100 V certainly is a compact camera (it measures 101.6mm x 58.1mm x 41.0mm and it weighs just 300g) but it’s not like any compact camera I’ve used before, with a wide range of functionality that includes full continuous autofocus at 24 fps and 4K video shooting. Early indications are that it will be a really good compromise for me compared to carrying a DSLR and it ticks a lot of positive boxes. I do though need to play with it more before I’m fully sold on leaving a DSLR behind on personal trips.

What I like about the Sony RX100 V

It’s lightweight and it has arguably the best image quality in its class - My primary reason for purchasing the RX100 was so I had an alternative to heavy camera gear when the weather was poor, the landscape was 'not worthy' or I wanted to take photos when out running in the hills. Great image quality was my next priority though and, whilst the RX100 raw files are not DSLR quality, the reduction in weight compared to the acceptable drop in image quality is I feel a worthy trade-off. The images definitely appear to be good enough for editorial submissions, which is what I'll most likely use them for.

Button programming - Professional DSLRs are super easy to use in the mountains. All the key controls I make use of regularly (exposure settings, ISO adjustments, exposure compensation, etc.) are at my fingertips and are easy to use, even with big gloves on. The gloves aspect can't be said for the RX100 but you can easily customise the controls to suit your preferences. I’ve programmed the camera as follows;

Electronic viewfinder - It's difficult to use a LCD screen in bright sunshine so having the option to look through an electronic viewfinder is very useful. I much prefer composing a shot when the camera is up at my eye.

Wifi - A Sony PlayMemories App (www.playmemoriescameraapps.com) enables you to transfer images wirelessly to your phone, which is ideal if you’d like to share images with someone or post them on social media. I also purchased Sony’s time lapse application.

Continuous autofocus at 24 fps. An essential part of outdoor sports photography is being able to capture an athlete in the right dynamic posture for that sport. The RX100 autofocus options include single shot, 3 fps, 10 fps and 24 fps. The latter you'd think would be ideal for outdoor sports but be aware it will ensure you have a TON of shots to review in your photography workflow. (You probably won't mind though when you get 'The Shot').

Battery life - The camera battery is rated for c.220 shots but, with the camera in 10 fps burst mode and operating in sub-freezing temperatures, I shot 1000+ shots in a day. High-definition video I’d imagine would soon chew up the batteries. I'll always carry at least one or two spares.

What I’d like to see improved

Bigger buttons - It’s not impossible but it’s difficult to use the buttons with ski gloves on, especially when switching the camera on and off, changing the exposure compensation or adjusting the drive and autofocus modes. Making the buttons larger however would likely mean a bigger camera body so the law of diminishing returns would apply.

Menu - I’m not fully of the view, as are some others, that the Sony RX100 menu is awful but there are some odd choices in regards to where things sit within the menu categorisation. A custom MyMenu option like Nikon offers would be appreciated (though you can program buttons on the RX100 to your liking, see above).

A hotshoe instead of a pop-up flash - I've zero use for on-camera flash on a compact camera and would prefer a hotshoe to which I could attach a remote trigger for long exposure shots or an external Rode mic for video work (though, frustratingly, the RX100 doesn't support external mics and there's a huge amount of wind noise in videos, even with the settings optimised in-camera).

Included accessories - I bought an AG-R2 camera grip (which I’d highly recommend), a camera strap and a battery charger. For the recommended retail price (MRP £1000) I'd expect Sony to include these with your purchase.

Alternatives

Sony RX100 I, II, III, IV - Possibly uniquely, all previous versions of the Sony RX100 are still available. If you're interested in the RX100, but budget is an issue, check out the features and reviews of the previous models

Sony A6500 - If I didn’t have my DSLRs I would choose the Sony A6500 over the RX100. Highly likely with a 16-70mm lens (I feel that 24-105mm on a full-frame body is a perfect do-it-all lens for personal trips into the mountains - I really wish Nikon did a Canon equivalent)

Part 2 of an occasional series where I'll share a list of outdoor and adventure sports-related books I've read over the years that I feel people viewing this blog may be interested in.

1. This Game of Ghosts by Joe Simpson

What do you think it does to your mind when you dangle from a loose peg for 12 hours on the north face of Aiguille du Dru? Amongst other stories, Joe Simpson shares what must be just a tiny glimpse into his thoughts as he recounts how the pillar of rock on which they were bivvied on the side of the iconic peak above the Chamonix valley, collapsed in the middle of the night and fell to the bottom of the mountain. 'This Game of Ghosts' was the follow-up book to Simpson's mountaineering classic, 'Touching the Void'.

2. Against the Wall by Simon Yates

Simon Yates (I’d suggest unfairly) is likely most popularly known in the mainstream as ‘the man who cut the rope’ in Joe Simpson’s 1998 bestseller ‘Touching the Void’. Yates' own book 'Against the Wall', his first of 3 books from his climbing career, recounts a first ascent of one of the tall pepper-pot peaks in Southern Chilean Patagonia. It’s full of detail about what life is like living and climbing on a 4,000ft big wall (which, by the challenges he shares, we learn is not always fun).

Paul Pritchard was on the first ascent of the Central Tower of Torres del Paine that Simon Yates wrote about in 'Against the Wall'. Paul is an excellent writer on his own account, sharing stories and anecdotes from climbing on the slate quarries of Dinorwig in Wales, the sea cliffs of Gogarth, all the way to Mount Asgard in Baffin Island in a book that won the prestigious Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. I particularly enjoyed Paul's account of a planned day out winter climbing in Scotland with Slovenian hardman Silva Karo.

4. Thin Air: Encounters in the Himalayas by Greg Child

Not the book about the 1996 Everest disaster by Jon Krakauer but hugely descriptive narrative by the Australian climber Greg Child of climbing in the high-altitude mountains of the Karakorum range in Pakistan. Greg climbed K2 in 1990 and he narrates this and other expeditions to 8000m peaks and technical climbs in the Karakorum, including Broad Peak, Shivling and Gasherbrum IV. There's plenty of anecdotes of his fellow climbers (including Georges Bettembourg and Doug Scott) and the level of detail he shares of the local lives and landscapes in this part of the world as he journeys into the mountains is fascinating.

5. Cold Oceans: Adventures in Kayak, Rowboat and Dog Sled by Jon Turk

I imagine Jon Turk is a highly-driven individual, singularly focused on achieving his goals and not one afraid to fail. He often does fail though and his writing in Cold Oceans makes you feel like you are alongside him, as he describes the challenges of tough, character-building expeditions to the colder, wetter parts of the globe (including what must have been a remarkably stretching, solo sea-kayaking expedition around Cape Horn (he'd never sea kayaked before) and a dog sledding journey in Greenland that left him being stranded by his partner deep in the Arctic).

In 1996, Jon Turk completed his sea kayak around Cape Horn in 1996. (Source: Pique News Magazine). In 2011, aged 65, he kayaked and pulled his boat nearly 2,500km around the circumference of the world's 10th largest island, Ellesmere Island, north-west of Greenland, with fellow adventurer Erik Boomer, a professional kayaker nearly 40 years his junior. Jon recounts their extremely adventurous expedition in his 2016 book - Crocodiles and Ice.

It's not often in Scotland you need snowshoes to get around. Our initial plans been to drive alongside Loch Arkaig in the West Highlands of Scotland and walk for a couple of hours into Glen Kingie to stay at Kinbreak bothy. Snowy weather conditions however on the drive from Edinburgh, with the occasional whiteout and stranded cars on the motorway as we travelled through Fife (not one-fifth of the way into our journey) led to what we felt was the sensible decision not to drive down an untreated road and we headed for the nearby Gleann Dubh-Lighe bothy instead.

I'd been to Gleann Dubh-Lighe before, when we climbed Streap in 2016. The walk-in to the bothy is excellent and we took turns breaking trail through fresh, ankle-deep snow. It's not a difficult walk-in though, even with 10kg of coal, and we were soon settled in and and trading conversation in front of a roaring fire. A few hours later, a couple from Fort William arrived, soaked in fresh snow, and, later still, a group of six turned up from Glasgow. (The latter group had also changed their mind about walking in to Kinbreak bothy). All of us commented on the amount of snow that was falling.

In the morning, we had a leisurely start before we headed again to Streap. Our goal was simply to repeat the route we'd done a few years previously and share with a friend how good it was. As it transpired, we got nowhere near the summit. The depth of snow made any walking without snowshoes incredibly difficult and it took us nearly four hours to ascend just 700m from Gleann Dubh-Lighe bothy onto Streap's south-west ridge. Our late start meant we arrived on the ridge mid-afternoon and, with our expectation being the deep and difficult snow conditions would continue (I was often waist-deep in powder and I’m 6’2” tall), we made what we deemed to be the sensible decision to bail on the still faraway summit and come back again another day (possibly for a summit camp in Spring). We were disappointed but our mood soon lifted when we returned to the bothy and the group from Glasgow had very kindly left us a half-full bottle of whisky (their good company and our own whisky being one of the reasons for our late start).